Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher, theorized that reality is unchanging and indivisible and that movement is an illusion. Zeno, a student of Parmenides, devised four famous paradoxes to illustrate the logical difficulties in the very concept of motion. Zeno’s arrow paradox starts and ends this way:

If you know where an arrow is, you know everything about its physical state….

The arrow does not move…

Classical Mechanics found the first point to be erroneous. To know the state of a particle, one must know not only its position X, but also its velocity and mass (what’s called its momentum P). Something similar happens with Quantum Physics. To know the state of a particle, we need to know whether the state of what it has interacted with before… exists, or not. According to old fashion metaphysics, that’s beyond weird. It’s simply incomprehensible.

The EPR Interaction: Zein Und Zeit. For Real.

[The Nazi philosopher Heidegger, an ex would-be priest, wrote a famous book “Being And Time“. However, rather than a fascist fantasy, the EPR is exactly about that level of depth: how existence and time come to be! And how those interact with our will…]

With that information, X and P, position and momentum, for each particle, classical mechanics predicts a set of particles’ future evolution completely. (Formally dynamic evolution satisfies a second order linear differential equation. That was thoroughly checked by thousands of officers of gunnery, worldwide, over the last five centuries.)

Highly predicting classical mechanics is the model of Einstein Sanity.

Aristotle had ignored the notion of momentum, P. For Aristotle, one needed a force to maintain motion (an objective proof of Aristotle’s stupidity; no wonder Aristotle supported, and instigated, fascist dictatorship as the best system of governance). Around 1320 CE, the Parisian genius Buridan declared that Aristotle was completely wrong and introduced momentum P, calling it “IMPETUS”.

Einstein thought so, and demonstrated it to his satisfaction in his EPR Thought Experiment. The EPR paper basically observed that, according to the Quantum Axiomatics, two particles, after they interacted still formed JUST ONE WAVE. Einstein claimed that there had to exist hidden “elements of reality”, not yet identified in the (Copenhagen Interpretation of) quantum theory. Those heretofore hidden “elements of reality” would re-establish Einstein Sanity, Einstein feverishly hoped.

According to Einstein, following his friend Prince Louis De Broglie (to whom he had conferred the Doctorate) and maybe the philosopher Karl Popper (with whom he corresponded prior on non-locality), Quantum Mechanics appears random. But that randomness is only because of our ignorance of those “hidden variables.” Einstein’s demonstration rested on the impossibility of what he labelled “spooky action at a distance”.

In 1964, the physicist John Bell, CERN’s theory chief, working with David Bohm’s version of Einstein’s EPR thought experiment, identified an inequality obeyed by any physical theory that is both local — meaning that interactions don’t travel faster than light — and where the physical properties usually attributed to “particles” exist prior to “measurement.”

(As an interesting aside, Richard Feynman tried to steal Bell’s result, at a time when Bell was not famous, at least in the USA: a nice example of “French Theory” at work! And I love Feynman…)

Einstein’s hidden “elements of reality” probably exist, but they are NON-LOCAL. (Einstein was obsessed by locality; but that’s an error. All what can be said in favor of locality is that mathematics, and Field Theory, so far, are local: that’s the famous story of the drunk who looks for his keys under the lamp post, because that’s the only thing he sees.)

Either some physical influences travel faster than light, or some properties don’t exist before measurement. Or both

I believe both happen. Yes, both: realityis both faster than light, and it is pointwise fabricated by interactions (“measurement”). Because:

The EPR Thought Experiment established the faster than light influence (and that was checked experimentally).

But then some properties cannot exist prior to “EPR style influence”. Because, if they did, why do they have no influence whatsoever, once the EPR effect is launched?

Now visualize the “isolated” “particle”. It’s neither truly “isolated” nor truly a “particle”, as some of its properties have not come in existence yet. How to achieve this lack of existence elegantly? Through non-localization, as observed in the one-slit and two-slit experiments.

Why did I say that the “isolated” “particle” was not isolated? Because it interfered with some other “particle” before. Of course. Thus it’s EPR entangled with that prior “particle”. And when that “particle” is “measured” (namely INTERACTS with another “particle”), the so-called “isolated” “particle” gets changed, by the “spooky action at a distance”, at a speed much faster than light.

(This is no flight of fancy of mine, consecutive to some naïve misinterpretation; Zeilinger and Al. in Austria, back-checked the effect experimentally; Aspect in Paris and Zeilinger got the Wolf prize for their work on non-locality, so the appreciation for their art is not restricted to me!)

All these questions are extremely practical: they are at the heart of the difficulties in engineering a Quantum Computer.

Old physics is out of the window. The Quantum Computer is not here yet, because the new physics is not understood enough, yet.

Great explanation to something inexplicable. Let me try to summarize:
When wave is localized (for example by measurement), it becomes a particle, but it still holds its non-measurable (because of lack of technology) wave properties. The wave connect the particle to the “tween” particle, with which it has a common history, when both were “part” of the same wave. If so they may interact at speed higher than speed of light. Did I get it right?

Except for the following two details:
1) The QUANTUM INTERACTION (MY own semantics) has been measured to be much faster than light (first by Alain Aspect in Paris-Orsay, who got the Wolf Prize for it).
2) the QUANTUM wave is “non-measurable” intrinsically. There is a whole lore out there of “Quantum Non-Demolition” and “Weak Measurement”, but the semantics is misleading (they are actually considering statistical ensembles).

[My only caveat is that, at cosmological distance, wave localization has got to partly fail, because I assume/have calculated the Quantum Interaction to go roughly at 10^10 times the speed of light c; hence Dark Matter… which is roughly four times more massive than Standard Model matter!]

Lots of Quantum Interactions at cosmological distances over the eons leaked a lot of Dark Matter. My theory predicts that the spatial locations of Dark Matter ought to be distinct from that of Standard Model matter, and found mostly where particular re-localizations tend to happen at cosmological distances, namely in the aura of galaxies (location being deduced from the galactic orbital speed curves).

I will not say that I am “familiar” with the analogue demonstrations, but I welcomed them. It was no coincidence that those were made in Paris first. De Broglie was disliked by many scientists in France for having been too influential in criticizing Quantum Mechanics, thus keeping many away from Quantum Field Theory’s aura, and work (although the “Higgs” idea came from Belgium…).

However, it starts to look as if Louis De Broglie is going to have the last laugh earlier than anticipated… Let me also add that I do NOT believe in the Pilot Wave the way De Broglie published it. Nor do I believe in Bohm’s Quantum Potential the way Bohm did. My own position is much more drastic, non-local, and non-linear. Yet, the Pilot Wave model is a good first approximation.

It’s CoudeR, BTW. Morgan Freeman’s excellent diction was uninformed of that fact: the R is pronounced.

Why entanglement? Because after a single Quantum interaction, there is just ONE Quantum Wave. Even if that ONE Quantum wave is one parsec across. This is the essence of the EPR paper. However, that wave is ALL there is: it’s a COMPLETE description. Thus, touching that wave anywhere, touches it all over.
That’s what entanglement is.https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/quantum-wave/

[Replying here to retain width] Yes, that answer is tautologically correct. What I am getting at is what dimension(s) does that wave exist in? It is clearly beyond our Einsteinian conception of time and space. I suppose this is where string theory takes off. And those particles appearing and disappearing into the Void… vas ist das?
cheers,
benign

The droplet experiments are a good first order depiction of what could be going on. However, in a fuller picture, they suffer from the same difficulty as De Broglie’s initial intuition. As I tried to explain in my essay, the problem is that the De Broglie Pilot wave theory assumes locality. Whereas NON-LOCALITY is both demonstrated theoretically (see the EPR argument, turned on its head) and experimentally (beyond any suspicion).

Thanks for the explanation. Didn’t Bohm make some attempt to deal with non-locality that was somehow supported by Bell? (I’ve no technical background in physics, so my questions may be naive and incomplete).

Bohm thought a travelling particle was influenced by a field, the Bohm Field (present Big Bang theory crucially uses a field, the Inflaton Field, to create cosmic inflation; so fields are frequent in physics).

De Broglie instead had the particle, itself a (presumably non-linear) wave, but guided by another wave, a linear wave, the wave which De Broglie had hypothesized in 1923. De Broglie’s theory is more supported by experimental evidence from independent laser beams, than Bohm’s tweak. However, even De Broglie does not have non-locality. Non-locality is obtained by assuming that the Bohm Potential/De Broglie Linear Wave propagates at speed TAU = 10^10c… (or so.)